MOSSMANIA is a product design brand that integrates a type of Nordic lichen into our personal living spaces. The Italian brand recently exhibited their moss-covered interior products, furnishings and décor at Milan Design Week 2016 in a showcase that promoted the lichen as a new, zero-maintenance material for indoor living and design.
For the showcase, the MOSSMANIA team displayed the various products they created, which included lichen wallpaper, resin-encased lichen benches, a range of lichen Japanese raku pottery and even a lichen fridge. There were also products designed with lichen in an array of different colours.
The designers source the lichen from Finland and then dry it out and treat it with a natural preservative so that the material remains fresh without the need for watering or looking after. From a maintenance point of view, MOSSMANIA removes the fuss of a standard indoor vertical garden, which usually requires inbuilt watering systems and specialist materials to install.
Apart from being an aesthetic solution to our concrete, manmade environments, the furry greenery is beneficial to us in other ways too. A lush layer of lichen in our living spaces can maintain a healthy level of humidity in the air, which helps prevent the contraction of influenza. Most importantly, lichen lives off air and not a root system in the ground. This means that it can act like a natural air purifier as it absorbs and stores unwanted and contaminated particles floating around in our personal spaces.
